The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in the present disclosure and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Many electronic circuits, such as processors, use power gating to turn off circuit blocks that are not in use, thereby saving power. Typically, some data must be retained in order to turn a circuit block off. That data may be stored in flip-flops and/or register file circuits, among other options. Some key challenges to power gating are to reduce latency to wake up from sleep mode, and to reduce standby power consumption in sleep mode.